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Officials in California are calling for an end to emergency drought restrictions requiring residents to make steep cuts in their water use after better-than-expected winter rains.

Local water suppliers said that ‘it doesn’t feel like an emergency anymore’ after rainfall arriving off the back of a record-breaking El Nino left many reservoirs at levels not seen since 2011. While regulators at the Association of California Water Districts admit some parts of the state are still badly in need of more rain, they say a sweeping state-wide order on water use is no longer needed.

Sacramento-area water districts urged state regulators Wednesday to release their customers from Gov. Jerry Brown’s emergency urban water conservation order, contending that a relatively wet winter has made continued cutbacks unnecessary.

Local water officials made their case before the State Water Resources Control Board during a hearing Wednesday. The board was soliciting input on whether to revise, relax or rescind the mandates that flowed from the emergency order Brown issued last spring requiring California cities to reduce water use by an average of 25 percent compared with 2013. The board is expected to announce its proposed revisions in early May.

California lawmakers on Tuesday advanced a bill that would put a on hold Gov. Jerry Brown’s $15 billion water plan unless it gets approval from voters.

The Bay Delta Conservation Plan would build massive, 30-mile-long twin tunnels underneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Last year, the state released a 48,000-page environmental impact report on the project. Critics and environmentalists obect to the plan, stating that it would not create more water for the drought-stricken state.

Bacon Island is 5,400 acres of what is arguably some of the richest reclaimed farmland on earth. It is 13 miles east of Antioch and 13 miles west of Stockton smack dab in the middle of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The Old River that parts ways with the main channel of the San Joaquin River west of the Mossdale Crossing snakes its way past Bacon Island on one side while the Middle River — that splits from the old River once it makes its way out of Lathrop — flows on the other side. 

In a significant step for the largest reservoir project in the Bay Area in 20 years, workers have finished building the spillway — a massive concrete channel as wide as eight lanes of freeway and a quarter mile long — at Calaveras Dam near the Alameda-Santa Clara county line.

The $810 million project to replace the old dam with a new, more earthquake-proof version has been beset by delays and cost overruns, due to the discovery of ancient landslides and other difficulties in the years since work began in 2011 that have made the project more complicated.